Geeksphone Ditches Smartphones for Wearables

In six years, Geeksphone became the first Spanish company to develop a smartphone, the first European organization to release an Android-based phone, and the first global brand to launch a Firefox OS mobile device.

Now it's ditching the handset industry...sort of. Geeksphone's multi OS platform will remain in the public domain, available to curious developers and current customers.

"[W]e have always tried to find the best balance concerning the values of open source and community development," co-founder Rodrigo Silva-Ramos said in a statement. "In short, everything that belongs to Geeksphone belongs to its users."

Established in 2009 by Silva-Ramos, Javier Agüera, and María Alzola, Geeksphone made a name for itself among smartphone usersalbeit not as common a name as Apple or Samsung. It's those very competitors from which Geeksphone appears to be distancing itself.

"Mobile telephony has changed a lot in recent years," Silva-Ramos said. "Our perception is that it is now a sector with great actors who have come to be where they are without much concern for innovation and without being concerned by the needs of its users."

"When we started the Geeksphone project, we never imagined that we would develop six smartphones in just five years," Silva-Ramos said. "We are very grateful and proud of having achieved so many professional and personal success[es] and, above all, we are extremely proud to have received great recognition from both the industry and the users."

But the cut-throat mobile industry leaves little room for attention to customers, "and it is very difficult for a company to maintain its viability and business with this philosophy," he lamented.

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So, instead, Silva-Ramos and Angel Sánchez Díaz created geeks!me, a new brand focused on the development of wearables. Its first product, set to launch in the coming months, will be an activity bracelet that allows users to "carry a healthier pace of life, in harmony with the environment."

Geeksphone's Customer Technical Support Service will remain in operation, though its entire engineering staff and Agüera are moving to Silent Circle's Blackphone (pictured)the super-secure mobile project with which Geeksphone partnered in 2013.

For more, see PCMag's lineup of 10 International Phone Makers You Should Know in the slideshow above.

Stephanie began as a PCMag reporter in May 2012. She moved to New York City from Frederick, Md., where she worked for four years as a multimedia reporter at the second-largest daily newspaper in Maryland. She interned at Baltimore magazine and graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (in the town of Indiana, in the state of Pennsylvania) with a degree in journalism and mass communications.
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